Posts Tagged With: maturity

Jesus is cool. He just isn’t the be all, end all. He was a good man. He taught good things. But he is not sufficient enough to handle the weight of all of your cares, needs, and expectations.

Or is he?

In various ways we hear the same message the Colossian Christians would have been hearing. Jesus is great but you need more than just Jesus. You need Jesus plus religious rituals. Jesus plus the law. Jesus plus knowledge. Jesus plus rigorous asceticism that shows your spiritual strength. Or Jesus plus carnal indulgence without spiritual affect, showing your spiritual strength. Or today we might say, Jesus plus a 401k plan. Jesus plus some good counseling. Jesus plus a group of friends. Jesus plus church. Jesus plus good works. Jesus plus a good education. Jesus plus career success. Jesus plus a good marriage.

Not that there is anything wrong with taking advantage of the help and blessings that can come from most of these “pluses.”

Right from the start, Paul makes us face whether we think Jesus is enough to complete our lives. Do we think Jesus is the center of our life; or is Jesus the add-on, the value added element, the plus in a life that is being lived just like everyone else in the world? We can tell from the letter that the false teaching threatening the Colossian church didn’t think Jesus was sufficient. If we are introspective enough, we can look at our own lives and tell whether we think Jesus is sufficient for life.

In Colossians 1, Paul offers the following assertions about the deep meaning and value to be found in the person of Jesus:

Paul starts with the most important and fundamental point of all: Jesus is the embodiment of God (1:15, 19). When you have Jesus you actually have God within you.

Jesus reigns over our home because God “transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved son” (1:13). He is in charge of our reality.

As he was the power that brought about creation (1:16), Jesus is the very reason we exist.

Jesus is the reason we do not fear God’s wrath (1:20, 22). We now have reconciliation, peace, and are viewed by God without accusation.

As the “firstborn from the realms of the dead” (1:18), Jesus is the reason we can be assured of our own resurrection.

We will all submit to something, and Jesus is our best object of submission. In a wordplay in 1:15-18 on the variations of the word “head,” Paul makes it clear that Jesus holds this position in reality, thus life is better lived in line with that reality.

In a truly difficult verse, Paul explains that it is now our job to “complete” the unfinished work of Jesus (1:24). The only thing that can be unfinished or “lacking” in the work of Jesus must be the part that depends on us: to be his hands and feet in this world today. Thus, Jesus becomes the purpose behind our mission in life.

When the King is “living within you as the hope of glory” (1:27), Jesus is our reason for hope.

Jesus is the core of our message, as “he is the one we are proclaiming” (1:28a).

Jesus is also our way to maturity as we “grow up” and become “complete” in him (1:28b)

It sounds like Paul thinks Jesus is more than just an add-on to a life that is looking elsewhere for meaning, security, and hope.

Before this faithfulness [of Jesus] arrived, we were kept under guard by the law, in close confinement until the coming faithfulness should be revealed. Thus the law was like a babysitter for us, looking after us until the coming of the Messiah, so that we might be given covenant membership on the basis of faithfulness. But now that faithfulness has come, we are no longer under the rule of the babysitter. (3:23-25)

I had many a babysitter growing up.

There was Debbie from down the street. She introduced me to Deborah Harry (aka Blondie) right at the height of the punk rock rage. Then it was Debbie’s sister and several teenage girls from church. After that, being five and seven years older than my brothers, I became the babysitter. I remember the time, though, I thought I was too cool to babysit my brothers, so my parents got one of my classmates named Renee to babysit. I was told that if I were too cool to babysit, then I was also too cool to stay in the house while they were away. I was exiled to the nearby park. There was also the summer we had a procession of “nannies,” all college girls from the local Baptist church. The most memorable of those was the one who was visiting from Zimbabwe for the summer. She made us hotdogs one day and buttered the buns. Didn’t toast them or anything. Just butter right up on the hotdog. Okay.

Babysitters are great . . . for a time. But it would be kind of weird, however, having a babysitter when you are 32. When your children are approaching the teen years you kind of get a sense that if they need a babysitter still, they might be a bit behind the curve. There is a time for the babysitting to stop.

When maturity comes, parents have faith in their children. Faith too in their parenting. They trust that the growing child has the inner guidance to go the right way themselves. Once you have experienced the freedom of adulthood, you don’t need a babysitter anymore.

What verse really got you thinking?

The word of God increased, and the number of disciples in Jerusalem grew by leaps and bounds. This included a large crowd of priests who became obedient to the faith. (6:7)

This group of 120 sure has grown. First it was to 3000, then over 5000 men. Now they are growing by “leaps and bounds.” Let there be no mistake, God wants His kingdom to grow.

Acts 1:6-8 is considered by many to be a bit of a thesis statement for the book. Many key themes from the book of Acts launch off from this passage. We also find here this sentence which also becomes the very structure of Acts:

Then you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judaea and Samaria, and to the very ends of the earth. (1:8)

Think of it like concentric circles spreading out from Jerusalem, where the events of Acts 1-4 took place. Now we are in the Judea section. The Jesus movement is still very much a Jewish thing, though now there are “Hellenistic” or Greek Jews in the mix. Next, with Philip we will see the gospel move to Samaria, a far less palatable place to a good, upstanding Jew. Paul and Barnabas will take the gospel in the latter half of the book into the pagan Greco-Roman world until the book ends in Rome, the furthest civilized city to the west where the gospel would realistically be expected to go. We know from Romans that Paul’s greatest desire is to go to the Far West, to Spain, where the gospel has yet to go. Unto the very ends of the earth, indeed.

God wants His kingdom to grow. I see nothing in the Bible that indicates God wants to sell the kingdom like a salesperson hawks his wares to one more empty shopper seeking a new trinket or novelty. No billboards and slick advertising campaign are needed (and if they are, aren’t we admitting we have turned God’s kingdom or at least our churches into one more consumer good?). Still, we don’t need to glory in being ostracized outsiders whose small numbers are a badge of honor. God wants growth.

We can be certain that God wants his kingdom to grow spiritually; maturity is always the goal. God intends for his kingdom to grow numerically, as we are seeing here in 6:7. As Acts 1:8 makes clear, God is looking for geographical growth too. That same verse confronts our insular and even prejudicial tendencies and says God is looking for a kingdom that grows ethnically. The kingdom is going to be a 64-pack of Crayolas, praise God! But that ethnic growth is what produces a problem in Acts 6 too as the leaders try to deal fairly with both Greek and Jewish widows. This verse from Acts 6 also indicates he wants the kingdom to become socially diverse; the Jesus movement was now made up of Galilean fisherman and now Jerusalemite priests too. Next thing you know, we will have ancient politician’s wives joining in (hint, hint).

Of course, God’s desires are no different today. What would it look like if our Christian circles were growing in numbers and spiritual depth, reaching out into new neighborhoods and countries, and becoming increasingly more diverse ethnically, racially, and socially?